


aristocrates

by ballantine



Series: noble consuls of rome [13]
Category: Ancient History RPF, Rome (TV 2005), Βίοι Παράλληλοι - Πλούταρχος | Parallel Lives - Plutarch
Genre: Gen, House Guests, M/M, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:21:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27230410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ballantine/pseuds/ballantine
Summary: Romans! A plague of Romans! (onhishouse?)
Relationships: Mark Antony/Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger
Series: noble consuls of rome [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1730350
Comments: 7
Kudos: 22





	1. Chapter 1

One fine day in the spring, Aristocrates sat beneath the tree in front of his house and contemplated the splendor of the tender new leaves standing out vibrantly against the sky.

It had been a quiet morning, and he wanted nothing but that it should remain a quiet day. But wishes were the universe's way of keeping mortals humble, so naturally he no sooner had the thought than a familiar figure stepped up to his house – a figure no one below the heavens would associate with quiet.

“Let me guess,” Aristocrates said. “You and Brutus quarreled again, and you have come seeking refuge under my roof. Again.” He spoke with no rancor, only resignation. Many years had passed since the last time, but he had not fooled himself to imagine this pattern would not resurface at some point.

Some people simply could not leave each another alone.

“Wrong on all counts, my friend,” said Antony cheerfully, leaning a hand heavily upon his short gate. “Brutus and I are in perfect accord – or we were when I left Rome.”

“Hm.”

“I am to go to Parthia,” he continued.

“You are going to fall over,” observed Aristocrates. And when the Roman wavered to do just that, he sprang up to support him under his arms. Once he had hands upon him, he could feel the heat beneath his tunic, and all remaining humor fled. “You burn with fever.”

Antony's mouth stretched into a smile a shade less than convincing. “It's nothing – the wound was mostly healed, and has only reawakened over the last days of my journey here.”

“Idiot,” he said mildly and turned them towards his door.  
  


* * *

  
The fever did not abate for three days; broke on the fourth; and returned on the sixth.

 _Does he bring forth black bile?_ asked the first doctor Aristocrates sought out for advice. _Phlegm? Yellow pus? No? Then why are you worrying – the fever, it will pass._

_And if it doesn't?_

_Then he will die._

“What did the healer say?” asked Antony's brother Lucius, anxiously awaiting news back at the house.

“Ah,” said Aristocrates, evasive. “He said... it is up to the gods.”

“So he's fucked,” said Antony's brother's wife.

Aristocrates looked into the room where Antony lay, sweating and insensate. The air was heavy with sickness. He thought, if Antony died it would surely ruin the room for any future romantic pursuits. He'd have to turn it into storage or something.

“I shall get a second opinion,” he said.

He consulted the root-cutters who plied their trade at the back door of the asclepieon and was given a decoction of marsh mallow and arkeion, which the slave Eros was to pour down Antony's throat, as well as a salve of peony to spread over the angry, half-healed wound.

For another week Antony's fever came and went with the regularity of the tide, but at last it broke and did not return.

For a time, all slept soundly beneath Aristocrates's roof.  
  


* * *

  
Antony's fever stayed away, but so did his appetite. Summer came on and he remained listless and weak.

News of increased pirate activity out of Sicily required he release his legions to assist, and he lapsed into a depressive malaise that stretched the weeks into months. When his brother and sister-in-law at last left his side to join the campaign, he barely seemed to notice their leave-taking.

“I haven't seen you so thin since the first time you came to Athens,” remarked Aristocrates one day in his garden. “But you were twenty-five then. No man of your current age should be so skinny. It's unnatural.”

“What would you recommend?” asked Antony, in the same terrible deadened voice he'd been using for months. He was lying flat on his back and staring unblinking at the sky.

“Wine,” he suggested, and upended his cup over the other man's face.  
  


* * *

  
“I perhaps did not handle that in the most delicate manner,” he said later, to Antony's closed and locked door. At his side, the slave Eros watched with disapproval.  
  


* * *

  
“I will try to be more sensitive in the future,” he said the next morning. At his side, the slave Eros waited anxiously with a breakfast tray that was not to be eaten.  
  


* * *

  
“You have to come out sometime,” he said the morning after that. “You need to bathe. I can smell you from the hall.” He waited for a response and, hearing none, turned to the slave Eros and said, “that room's window has a strong trellis and weak latch, you should be able to climb inside.”  
  


* * *

 _  
I do not know what ails him_ , he wrote to Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger, who had written demanding, in his typical high-handed fashion, a detailed accounting of their friend's health. _Antony's body is fully healed, but his spirit remains low. I believe the forced inaction of these past six months has weighed heavily on his mind. Part of him does not believe he will ever return to his former self, and as a result he has become a bit of a downer at parties. Perhaps if you conjure up a little war nearby, this might alleviate the worst of his melancholia.  
  
_

* * *

  
Matters improved a little when the warring season drew down and a few of Antony's legions returned to Athens for the winter.

Antony's youngest brother Gaius arrived in the city. Aristocrates found him amusing at first, for he looked just like a miniature version of Antony but possessed a passion for only politics, which he talked about at length every moment he was not drinking (when he was drinking, he picked fights).

“This is why the Greeks lost, you know,” he was fond of saying regarding any facet of Athenian life he found lacking.

One night Gaius made the mistake of saying this to Adrastos. Adrastos was endeavoring to abstain from wine until the end of the year, and his temper had suffered for it. The ensuing fight destroyed three couches and scorched Aristocrates's favorite rug – but Antony, standing with his arms outstretched between Adrastos and his sneering, bloody-nosed little brother, laughed for the first time in three months.


	2. Chapter 2

One lovely day late in the summer, Aristocrates sat beneath the tree in front of his house and contemplated the leaves fluttering in the wind, and the pleasing, undemanding accompaniment they gave his deeper thoughts.

Presently, a man wandered up the street; Aristocrates watched him approach from a distance. He seemed to stop and peer at every house before shaking his head and continuing along.

“You look lost, friend,” he called out, when the man was closer and it seemed inevitable that he would inspect his house.

He looked around and caught sight of him under the tree. He asked, in terrible broken Greek, “Sorry – you addressing me?”

Aristocrates inclined his head and waited as the man walked closer, stepping up to the fence. Then he said again, enunciating carefully, “You look lost.”

The Roman repeated the word _lost_ to himself thrice before figuring it out. “Lost? No.” He pointed over his shoulder. “Auster. Direction I come – or rather, um. You say... notos?”

“So you know where you are?” he asked patiently.

“Oh!” He looked around again, as if expecting a sign to materialize and tell him, though Aristocrates found it doubtful he would be able to read it if one existed. His shoulders slumped a little as he looked back at him. “No,” he decided. But then he smiled, and even though Aristocrates made no attempt to smile back, the smile had staying power.

He was either a simpleton or peculiar, he decided. No Roman was this friendly.

Aristocrates waited a beat, undecided if he wanted to get up from his seat and interrupt what had been a fine meditation. But something about the open, undemanding expression on the man's face called out to him. So he silently sighed to himself and stood, brushing off his chiton as he stepped up to the edge of the street.

He was half a head taller than the man. As Aristocrates was not particularly tall, this was something he noticed with interest.

He asked, “What are you searching for?”

Again the slight hesitation as the Roman parsed the question. Then: “Marcus Antonius was staying here,” said with a wave at their general surroundings. And then he pointed again over his shoulder. “They said.”

“The general Antonius?” An obvious stalling tactic; as if there was another in Athens.

“Former consul. But – yes, him. In the house of one called Aristocrates. Do you know of him?” he asked hopefully.

Aristocrates looked at him more closely, noticing what he hadn't fully before: the solid stance, the hard muscles. He was so distracted by the appealing face, he'd overlooked the obvious. This man was a soldier.

He unfolded his arms and extended a finger to the right, where the street wound and disappeared down a steep hill.

“I'm afraid you were told wrong,” he said. “The man they call Aristocrates-Who-Consorts-With-Romans lives at the foot of the Areopagus, where the fir grow in a thick line covering the neck of the white rock.”

The man stared with little if any comprehension. He sifted through the words and said at last, “Areopagus?” He looked in the direction Aristocrates had pointed. “That's a, a hill? Right?”

He nodded serenely.

“Alright,” he said in Latin, a little dubious but too polite to express his doubt. He hitched his toga up on his shoulder and nodded, expression firming. He summoned another smile, and Aristocrates blinked. Twice.

“I thank you, sir,” said the Roman. “Have a lovely day.”

Aristocrates went back to his tree, but he could not get comfortable again. He shifted against the root digging into his spine and stared with some dissatisfaction in the direction the man had walked (the direction he had told him to walk).

Nothing good would come of this, he decided. But then, nothing good ever came with Romans.  
  


* * *

  
“Marcus!” shouted Gaius as he banged into the house that evening. “Marcus, come look at what I've found!”

Antony quirked an eyebrow and put his head back to return the shout, ordering his brother to bring his find to the table. This necessitated a third shout from the doorway, at which point Aristocrates stopped listening, sighed, and sipped his wine.

His house used to be so quiet.

There was a thump and Gaius could be heard from the hall saying, “No, don't worry about it, someone else will take care of it—” and Aristocrates narrowed his eyes at the doorway just in time for the wandering Roman from earlier that day to appear.

Their eyes met. The man looked mostly puzzled, though outrage was starting to surface.

“He says he's a friend of Brutus,” said Gaius cheerfully. He threw himself down on a couch and reached for the wine.

Antony straightened. “Lucilius. This is a surprise. Last I heard, you were in Brundisium _._ ”

“I have been many places this past year and a half.” His voice was much changed upon switching to his native tongue; certainty suited this Lucilius. His eyes dragged themselves back to Aristocrates, and he cocked his head. “Sorry, but did you—”

He sighed and waved a hand at a free seat. “You might as well sit and have a drink,” he said in words the man would understand.

“So you speak Latin?” he asked. “This whole time you could speak Latin? But why didn't you say?”

Aristocrates lifted his shoulders. “How will your Greek improve if you do not practice?”

Antony looked between them. “You two have already met?”

“Yes, he – wait. You lied to me!” He looked around the table. “He sent me in the wrong direction when I came looking for this very house.”

Antony slid a look over to him and he shrugged, not bothering to deny it.

“Forgive him,” said Antony. “Aristocrates has a strange sense of humor but he means no harm.”

“Short-lived deception with lack of follow-through,” said Gaius sagely, pulling at the hem of Lucilius's toga until he sat. “It's why the Greeks lost, you know.”  
  


* * *

  
“In his last letter, Brutus indicated I could find him here,” explained Lucilius. “I suppose I have beaten him to it.”

Antony's hands stuttered in mid-air and Aristocrates's eyebrows rose delicately.

“The princeps is leaving Rome?” asked Aristocrates, to cover the moment. “We had not heard this news.”

“You mean – Brutus is coming here?” asked Gaius. He sounded bizarrely eager; yet another reason to despise the youngest Antonius, he thought darkly.

“I suppose he didn't want to make a big to-do about it,” said Lucilius, with what Aristocrates would quickly come to recognize as his customary tendency for understatement.

Antony reached over the table to snag a pear. “More like, he was worried they'd try to stop him if he tarried.” He bit hugely into the pear, hiding his expression by chewing vigorously. After a few seconds, he caught Aristocrates's eye and gave a wordless, unconvincing _what?_

Resigned, Aristocrates turned back to Lucilius. “When should we expect him?”


	3. Chapter 3

One crisp day in autumn, Aristocrates sat out beneath the tree in front of his house and glowered through the bare branches at the heavy, low-hanging sky.

Romans! A plague of Romans!

Antony was one thing – Aristocrates had long ago pledged to stand beside his ridiculous friend, and oaths taken in the full bloom of drunken youthfulness were among the few he was loathe to break – but now it seemed Antony's countrymen would strain the very mortar of his house. For no sooner had this Lucilius character appeared than a bevy of army couriers began streaming to and fro from the door.

And oh, a Roman could not go anywhere without the dull rattle of leather straps and heavy tramp of boots following; hideous in their uniforms and their ill-humored set expressions. A continual reminder that his city was occupied and subjugated by the most gaudy, officious nation ever to sprout along the Mediterranean.

Meanwhile, Gaius was overjoyed in anticipation of the princeps's visit; he viewed Brutus as the consummate politician, much to the other three men's bemusement.

His brother's effusive delight seemed to put even Antony ill off his wine. The man threatened to beat him more than once for his overwrought praise. The house grew impossibly more claustrophobic when the two were quarrelling.

Thus Aristocrates now sat outside, an exile from his own hearth. And, as if to confirm the depths of his itinerancy, he was soon joined by a wild dog.

It appeared in a fashion by bursting forth from the street and diving straightaway into the thick blanket of leaves in front of his house. It was a massive, heavy-jowled thing, black as night and with a growl that might have put at least two-thirds of Cerberus to shame.

Aristocrates seized up in terror for only a moment before collecting himself. He stood so he could look down upon the beast and ordered it loudly from his estate. But it paid no heed, not the first time, nor after the second and third iterations.

“Baccha,” said a familiar stern voice. The beast's head rose from its plunder of the leaf bed. Both it and Aristocrates turned to look to the gate. “Come.”

And the dog withdrew to his side, gentle and easy.

“So _you_ control this animal?” said Aristocrates. “Well. You might have also taught it to obey commands from those who are not yourself.”

“Pray do not be sour with me over another's actions,” said Brutus. “We all choose our own masters, Aristocrates.”


End file.
